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EW Project 2: Presentation and conclusion

So the presentation went pretty well. After a little calibration with our 'garbage simulation ballasts' the system worked extremely well. It worked consistently and reliably. Here's us tinkering with the system with our chosen ballasts, cans of cool refreshing Coca Cola™. Here's us doing some last-minute tinkering:

Overall I felt the presentation went really well. I think we conveyed the idea fairly effectively and the demo went off without a hitch. One thing we probably should have elaborated on a bit more was the reward system.

Some future improvements to the system include:

Weekly or monthly scores. While doing it live is pretty cool, it can be wildly unreliable as it relies on the trash currently in the bin, which can vary so much. However averaging it over a longer period of time would produce a nice average score over the course of a longer, more representative timeframe/

Developing further on the first point, a semi-live system that only updates with full binloads. For example the weight of the bin only gets measured when each bin is about to be emptied. The score is then generated from the total weight of waste and recycling over the course of a timeframe.

An implemented government-sponsored rewards system providing tax breaks and other bureaucratic rewards to the companies that have the highest scores.

A third bin for compost. While recycling is great, composting is also another great way of saving the planet. The score would then be a lot more awkward to work out because compost biodegrades, however using some more advanced sensing systems i'm sure it would be possible.

Here's a render Stylianos made of what the system could look like:

The screen in the middle could be used to to display a number of things including the leaderboard of other local companies, incentivising the user to score higher than the other local companies on the through healthy competition. It could also be used to display statistics about the user's disposal/recycling habits.

I felt the project went really well, I learned a lot about Node Red and I'm convinced that that is something I'm going to be using for my final year project along with the MQTT protocol. Node basically does almost exactly what I need for my project, albeit with a little hacking here and there.

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